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Posts Tagged ‘psychology’

Education advice for new traders

May 25, 2010 8 comments

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Learning to survive in the world of daytrading and swing trading is no small undertaking. If it were easy, everyone could do it. The ocean of trading is filled with sharks who are looking to gobble up easy marks. You want to make sure that you’re not an easy catch for them.

Some people learn best on their own, through a combination of reading and reflective practice. Other people are more social in nature and seem to do better by joining a trading tribe and learning from a group mastermind. Either way can be successful for you, but you have to know what style of learning is best suited for you.

Any y book by any reputable trading author will suggest that the key to success in the market is finding your own unique niche and relying on your own preparation and insight to make your way through the complexity. If all you are doing is following the crowd, you won’t be able to find any advantage and then you might as well be investing in low cost index mutual funds or exchange traded funds.

As a trader, you need to have a personal and unique edge that allows you to consistently pull profits from the market. As such, you should plan on doing a lot of self work and individual research in order to find techniques and strategies that are well-suited to your personality.

Reading books is a good way to help expedite that search, but there is no substitute for your personal effort. The books of Dr. Alexander Elder are a good place to start to begin learning the basics of professional trading. He does a good job of analyzing psychology, risk management and trading strategies for the new trader and experienced trader alike. His background in psychology and decades of professional trading practice make him well-qualified to provide advice to beginning traders. You could do a lot worse than starting with his books.

No matter what though, the best book that you can read about trading is the book that you write: your own trading journal, in which you will identify every trade you make, why you made it, the results and the specific lessons that you can learn from your practice. There’s no substitute for this kind of reflective learning.

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Risk management for new traders

May 24, 2010 3 comments

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Daytrading seminars, trading books, television commentators and radio advertisements are filled with promises of easy money in the stock market. With just a little bit effort and a fistful of dollars, you too can be enjoying the lifestyle of the rich and famous.

We know in our hearts that this is not true and yet everyday people put their hard-earned money down on the hopes of finding their path to financial freedom in the stock market. This is the same feeling that sheep have on the way to being sheared.

You should remember that anytime you begin a new venture,  you are easy money and that you can expect to pay a price in time, effort and money to learn how to survive in the trading game.

Your education begins with an honest assessment of the kinds of risks you are likely to face. You should be writing a business plan as a trader in order to account for these risks and the way you intend to manage them, so that you have a fighting chance of breaking even in your first year as a traitor and then surviving long enough to learn how to make profits.

At a minimum you should at least consider how to address the following kinds of risks:

1. Psychological risks: these are the challenges that your ego, peer pressure and family situations can bring to trading. If you’re trading family money, or trading in public, or trading for any reason other than to make money to feed your family then you run the risk of getting in your own way with your poor psychology. The stock market acts in a way to cause the most pain to the most number of people based on herd psychology. If you do not work on your psychology than you will be a herd animal offering your money to the carnivores. Conduct self assessments into your strengths and weaknesses, take trader psychology profiles to determine what manner of strategy is best suited for your psychological makeup and conduct routine daily journaling to itemize your performance and learn from your mistakes.

2. Market risks: there’s no way to avoid the risk inherent in the market, because it is precisely the risk which provides the opportunity for reward. You therefore must become a master of the specific dynamics of the market you have chosen to trade. How volatile is it? Who are the major players? What are the cycles associated with the instruments you intend to trade? What are the rules for capitalization, leverage and clearing of trades? What are the seasonal risks associated with fewer trading targets?

3. System risks: these are the risks that are inherent in particular trading strategies that are designed to achieve an edge in certain markets. There are risks associated with mechanical trading systems, just as there are risks with intuitive or discretionary systems. Knowing your system well, means that you can identify the explicit risks as well as the implicit risks with each strategy. With a healthy dose of humble pie and a conservative nature you can work to minimize these risks.

4. The risk of nonlinear events: any system can be backtested long enough to give you a sense of how it should perform in the kinds of markets that have already occurred. The hidden risk of back testing is that you may experience discontinuous events which change the correlation numbers for your systems.  There are  portfolio engineers who study the past in order to find the relationships between different asset classes. When nonlinear events or catastrophes occur, it is normal for these historical correlations to change dramatically and you can find out where you thought you were hedged in fact you are double exposed.

The short list of risks only begins to scratch the surface of the kinds of challenges awaiting a traitor in the world of the equity markets. If this shortlist is intimidating then you have a fighting chance to be able to survive in your first year. If these risks don’t concern you at all,  chances are you’ll be seeking employment elsewhere.

Respect the game, respect the markets and acknowledge the real risks waiting for you on the road to financial freedom through daytrading. Good luck and good trading!

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appreciative intelligence improves youth soccer coaching

May 17, 2010 9 comments

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Coaches must be concerned with the development of their players both on the field and off the field. In order to build strong young girls who can stand on their own 2 feet in life, we can leverage the insights from the field of positive psychology and specifically appreciative intelligence. Appreciative intelligence in girls youth soccer can help you build the emotional strength in young girls that they need to compete on the soccer field, in school and in life.

Appreciative intelligence simply means that we choose to focus on the positive elements of our most successful experiences as individuals and members of the team. By focusing on these areas we set the tone and shape the agenda for the emotional development of our players. By emphasizing the positive we ensure that we don’t backslide into thoughts of negativity and regret.

Appreciative intelligence has a long history of success in many different areas of business, government and education and is a proven technique for getting the most out of your people and your teams. It began with studies of the emotional reselling its emotional intelligence found in high performing entrepreneurial enterprises and business startups and has broadened into a wider appreciation of positive psychology.

Try this technique after your next game and see if it doesn’t work wonders on your teams attitude, whether they won or lost. Gather the girls in a circle and ask each one of them to think about their favorite memory on a positive note about one of your other players. By doing so, each girl is emphasizing the positive and each girl gets to hear their friends and teammates praising them for something that they did that was worthy of recognition.

I’ve tried this dozens of times after games and we invariably finish the experience on such a high note that it carries us through the rest of the week and into the next game. This positive result occurs whether we won or lost. We all leave the field with a very positive feeling and of thankfulness for the quality of the members of our team who we support and to support us in good times and bad.

Give it a try and see if appreciative intelligence will work for you in the same way.

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Learning from the process consultant

April 22, 2010 3 comments

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Think about the last time you worked with a consultant in your organization: looking back at what the consultant did and said, were there any specific behaviors that surprised you? Did she do something that you and the faculty were not already capable of doing?

If they did something new, is the new behavior something you think your staff can now perform on their own war will it be necessary to continue to have a consultant to achieve the freedom to state the insights?

If they didn’t do anything new, what did the presence of the consultant really contribute to the process? Did they help create a safe space for discussion and reflection? Did they encourage fresh thinking that you couldn’t get to in the normal conduct of meetings with the staff?

Did you find yourself nodding as he or she spoke and saying “of course! I knew that all along!”

did the consultant offers specific opinions or insights or were they like a lawyer asking leading questions or Socrates guiding the team indirectly to the truth? Or did they simply put the question out there and let the answer go where it may?

Did they do anything that you now think “I have to add that to my skill set!”

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The persona of the process consultant: is it intentional or assigned?

April 22, 2010 2 comments

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I’m wondering if you have ever had the experience of deliberately planning your relationship to the organization you’re trying to help change.

I am discovering that I tend to have a particular role that I favor witches being an expert. Sometimes when I act as an expert by taking nonconfrontational or non-directive role and try to encourage the group to join me on the path of self discovery, but I am starting to realize that deep down I still consider myself to be an expert. I get uncomfortable when I am in the middle of uncertainty and I can see that part of being a good process consultant is to embrace the uncertainty and trust the group process.

Do you have a preferred persona for intervention?

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Reflecting on self-directed leadership in a military college environment (an action research approach)

March 20, 2010 24 comments

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The purpose of this assignment is reflect upon my learning through this course and to describe what I am doing to provide for the development of leadership capabilities in those who look to me for direction and guidance. My professional work centers on preparing Army organizational leaders for a world of complexity and uncertainty, and specifically in designing a teachable curriculum that satisfies both the accreditation system and the needs of individual students and faculty. As a result of many cycles of action research involving a variety of stakeholders, I have been designing curriculum that seeks to maximize the opportunities for student and faculty Voice in all phases of the classroom experience, including: design, preparation, delivery, assessment and follow-through. Because the strategy represents a significant shift from the traditional methodology, I am finding many leadership challenges and opportunities throughout the program. I will explore a number of important themes and strategies in this paper.

Chaos and complexity theory point towards a need for multiple points of view and an accommodating culture and practice in order to account for uncertainty in the world. Leaders set the stage for an organization that seeks to thrive under these conditions and therefore become primary leverage points in setting the conditions for success. Because our students are not objects at a distance,  not third-party objects of study but rather thinking, feeling human beings with insights and experiences and discretion, we have shifted our design team composition to include routinely groups of students in the form of focus groups and co-researchers in the action research tradition. Incorporating students in the design of lessons that will be taught that academic year represents a paradigm shift.

I am shifting our feedback system to incorporate more qualitative assessments from both faculty and students. This is a departure from our standard practice of relying exclusively on quantitative instruments. Our new feedback system for programmatic assessment is much more from the mixed methods tradition, which seems to me to be central in going forward in our efforts to understand and appreciate complexity. My intent is that the mixed methods approaches in the classroom will expose students and faculty to this methodology as a way to prepare them with a useful tool beyond the boundaries of the college environment.

I am systematically pursuing outreach and connections with faculty and curriculum designers from other teaching departments  in order to establish a network-centric approach to integrated curriculum design. This is taking the form of a leaderless, self-directed workgroup, with group norms and processes emerging to take the place of formal assigned individual hierarchical leadership. This self-directed work group presents recommendations of consensus to the traditional leadership of the College and is proving to be more and more influential with each successful project.

Because collaborative and adaptive leadership represents a shift in the cultural and operational perspective of the college, students and faculty, it is necessary to build up a resource and reference base that can be used to justify and support our inquiries. We are building a set of wiki’s and blogs that are interactive in order to prepare for our new lineup of lessons, to support collaborative learning inside the lessons dynamically, to document the results of our in class inquiry and to expand the knowledge base both for future lessons and for the field force in general. There is evidence to show that our students and faculty are getting the hang of this technique. This is reshaping the way we approach lesson preparation and our resource base and it is carrying over into our distance learning and remote site teaching strategy. Remote site teachers now have access to our growing experience base on the wiki and blog and can use that in their classroom for air where they do not possess personal experience and expertise.

Finally, I am working with interested others in formalizing our new approaches into college policy and SOP in order to lock in our games in the college’s infrastructure. Without these changes, initiatives are only as enduring as the energy of the interested parties. By incorporating them into our explicit rules and policies, we can institutionalize changes and ratchet our way towards success.

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education, leadership, biodiversity and the limits of reason

March 18, 2010 11 comments

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at the other end of the time scale from the doctoral programs, i think the right model to use is that of bio-diversity.

It’s not “survival of the fittest” in the wild, it is extinction of the unfit & toleration of the “good enough” which promotes a broad gene pool. A broad gene pool gives us the adaptive flexibility to adjust to “black swan” events, (Taleb).

well, our educational system should seek to promote that kind of diversity in outreach, methods, programs etc and not just short-sidedly focus on how to efficiently pass the next round of standardized tests which are geared for the immediate environment, but which leave us uneducated for the possibilities of an infinitely rich future

there are many skills, habits, behaviors, attitudes which dont thrive in an individual, cut throat environment, but which may be needed for  an environment that favors cooperation: such as living in a nuclear age.

I think it’s important to remember that “the failure” is in the system’s inability to provide a medium for the seed that is the person to flourish.

We know from “The Long Tail” that digitization and globalization allow for the creation of feasible 1:1 relationships. we are less constrained to find “economic” tradeoffs that satisfy the many and underserve the tails of the distribution.

We should, therefore be looking to expand the set of possible methods and resources to serve those further out on the tails of the distribution in order to  broaden our “gene pool” of human potential.. See Axelrod on “The Evolution of Cooperation” for example

Good survival strategy for the a species, all species, for life itself, is to maximize biodiversity, because of the possibility of discontinuous “shock” events to the environment, for which prior specialization is unsuited.

The examples of Branson and Gates amply illustrate the rich rewards waiting for us on the untapped wide tails of the human distribution

It is arrogant of education to presume it can forecast the future and determine what can and should be precisely taught for “success”.

If education hasn’t learned that yet, then it should attend some of its classes in the sciences and arts to discover the limits of pure rationality and control :D

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is there a difference between coaching and mentoring?

February 5, 2010 1 comment

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Here are the differences I see between coaches and mentors:

1. to me coaching is about improving performance first and the person second. I see mentors focused on individual growth, holistically, rather than specific or particular performance.

2. I think the coach gets his power or authority from the formal position that he holds on the team or organization and his role is generally well understood and standardized, whereas a mentor I think shapes his role in consultation with his partner.

3. I think coaches are taking specific looks at improving performance on a particular task and usually as a member of the team whereas I think the mentor is considering positive personal growth that spans a career or an entire life.

4. I think mentors get chosen by the junior partner whereas coaches are assigned to a team in your on the team so that your coach and perhaps the only choice you have is whether or not to join the team.

5. I think coaches have standardized templates of high-performance that’s related to specific tasks whereas mentors develop the agenda for growth after consulting with their junior partner.

6. I know a lot of people that don’t have mentors and yet seem to do just fine, whereas I cannot imagine a team that would do very well without a coach

7. I think there are many times when coaches can be directive and authoritarian, whereas a mentor just about has to be Socratic to be effective since everything is about the inner life of the junior partner whereas in coaching it’s about the team

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“I am the President: you MUST trust me” Newspeak anyone?

January 30, 2010 Leave a comment

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RealClear Politics highlights an obvious issue; obvious unless you are a journalist or a true believer in government in general or Obama specifically:

Would President Obama and the Democrats‘ legislation allow government to come between citizens and their choice of doctors and insurers? Obama promised it wouldn’t. Republicans said it would, and this was one of the aspects of the legislation that led them to characterize it as a government takeover of health care – the same characterization that Obama chastized the GOP for today.

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Reflecting on Heifetz and Hunt on leadership

January 28, 2010 3 comments

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Reflecting on Heifetz (2009): The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, and Hunt (1994) Leadership:A new synthesis

Heifetz et. al. Ch 6 notes (carry over from last week)

Heifetz continues to discuss authority’s role in achieving adaptive leadership but draws the distinction between authority and leadership. This separation causes him conceptual problems. He describes authority figures involved in controlling and allocating resources, negotiating, and connecting goals with values. If these actions, decisions and choices are not central to any common sense definition of leadership, then I don’t know what does, but these fall outside of Heifetz is definition of adaptive leadership. It’s convenient for his message but does not connect to the world as I know.  This matters because Heifetz positions himself as a giver of practical advice and common sense. So it seems to me that commonsense definitions of normal words should be applied whenever possible.

They have an important discussion of being successful in politics in order to be successful adaptive leaders. They suggest thinking of politics as a web of stakeholders. An alternative metaphor for politics is that of warring tribes. The difference in these two mental models is significant when you consider how to approach another member of the community to engage in pursuit of common goals.

Networks are designed to operate together; warring tribes must be enticed and protected against at the same time. Their subsequent discussions of how to successfully engage in politics actually uses the warring tribes model more so than their stated model of networks. This is a problem for a book that does not emphasize the theoretical constructs that support their techniques and tips.

This chapter is big on specifics and checklists but is not as insightful in its discussion of intangibles in social settings, which is surprising, given their focus on exactly those settings as being suitable for adaptive leadership.

On page 91 they emphasize the importance of making interpretations about the behavior of others, but without acknowledging the complexity and inherent uncertainty of just such an activity. I think they should eat their own cooking by discussing how important the communication between members of the network or  tribes is in order to resolve matters of interpretation. The Harvard Negotiation Project provides a nice framework that transcends both of these discussed mental models when it comes to effective mutual cooperation between different groups.

The concept of “maximum sustainable rate of change” of a given system  came to mind as they described the practical and realistic limits of change when you involve multiple groups of stakeholders. I thought that part was well done. The idea of a “hange space” came to mind as a visualization of how much room you have to navigate as you take on the adaptive challenge and that the boundaries are defined by the edge of fear of loss and sense of risk provided by all the participants.

Heifetz chapter 7 notes:

it struck me that many of the descriptions of adaptive leadership would work equally well for the concept of learning organizations . There is a strong connection between what Heifetz suggests about building an adaptive culture and all the work that has been done over the years on learning organizations. It continues to be a shortcoming of this book that other theoretical and practical contributions are not acknowledged. If their work is uninformed by the literature on learning organizations,  they are not marginal ; if they deliberately elected to exclude, then no more needs to be said about their work.

I would like to see more discussion in this book about the balance between reward and risk when it comes to encouraging people to try new behaviors or adopt a different frame. They described the idea of loss avoidance and risk properly , but the connection to the benefits that could occur if we are successful has not been made. This kind of discussion would be especially important when in chapters 8-12,  they describe enlisting the support of authority figures to help create conditions for adaptive learning.

The discussion of the four meetings that occur when every meeting is held can be found in the action research literature but was a good synthesis of those ideas, once again without attribution. Unfortunately I believe their discussion of meetings and how to leverage them fall into the category of tactical techniques and do not describe a strategic approach of using all modes of communication to present the business case for this being an adaptive opportunity and not just another technical exercise. I think they spend too much time on the individual as hero and not on creating conditions inside an organizational culture. I feel like they are giving us snacks and not a meal.

On page 103 I think they should realize that there is a difference between having shared responsibility for a process and the techniques required to truly conduct cross team problem solving. These are two separate but related ideas.y

It is ironic that in chapter 7 the describe the value of sticking to your guns as suboptimal, but in later chapters they will describe the importance of maintaining your position in the face of opposition. Like all good platitudes it has its equal and opposite platitude which sometimes applies. They do not make the distinction of how to choose which platitude is appropriate.

I do like their discussion of building the bench and creating adaptive leadership capacity at all times and not waiting for an adaptive crisis to begin these deliberations. This however has everything to do with what they call the authority figures establishing direction and purpose. I think because they want to create a distinction between adaptive leaders and authority figures, they can’t go in that direction and simply call authority figures leaders. I think they are trapped in their own semantics.

The omission of a discussion of the literature on high reliability organizations is a great shortcoming of this chapter when they’re talking about building an adaptive organization. There are decades of theoretical and practical contributions made by scholars like Carl Weick which are overlooked.

Chapter 8 making interpretations

Heifetz describes effective visions as possessing a high degree of accuracy. I offer an additional insight which is that sometimes the feelings and fuzzy concepts are more important, particularly when we’re making important decisions with our emotional brain’s and the feeling becomes more important than the details;  people want to feel safe and excited and not necessarily need needing to know all of the details which come from accuracy. Think about the importance of impressionistic painting in terms of creating a mood and atmosphere which is accomplished precisely without accurate details.

I agree with their position that learning is pain on page 115. I like their discussion about reframing tension away from the personal frame of reference and moving it to the systemic frame of reference. By showing that complex systems inevitably must have friction points that can be managed and adjusted we can remove some of the interpersonal challenges to adaptive change.

The table on page 117 that shows the transition between technical and adaptive challenges is a nice treatment of what other scholars have called the locus of control. This can be a helpful way to conduct reframing.

Dr. Michael Roberto has done some good work on classifying default organizational processes as cultural artifacts. He describes the “cultures of yes”, the “cultures of no”, and the “cultures of maybe” as being default responses to new ideas and stressors. So it is possible to have a default response that is process oriented as well as what Heifetz described as an interpretive scheme. It’s not just the content, it’s our default way of processing that can present problems for adaptation.

The idea on page 122 of auditioning your ideas has everything to do with increasing informal authority which is normally considered to be leadership and influence but which in Heifetz’ definitions falls outside of the domain of leadership. This continues to be a problem with their language.

Chapter 9: designing effective interventions

the Heifetz model only seems to account for linear projects that can move from phase to phase through time. Although they acknowledge the need to plan for the course corrections I don’t see evidence of multiple loop learning and processing.

There is a lot of literature on the challenges of design versus planning, which come down to the idea that when you know what to do and what success clearly looks like, then you can plan. When you have uncertainty and must explore and experiment, or adapt in Heifetz’s language, what you do is design which works from potential solutions back towards problem definition and identification. In this sense, design is the exact opposite of planning. This does not fit into the linear processing model that Heifetz offers and is the example of another shortcoming of ignoring the theoretical models that apply in this area.

Chapter 10: acting politically

this chapter is not convincing, because they’re talking about increasing their informal and formal authorities through political techniques. While this may be tactically effective in the short term, playing normal political games doesn’t seem to be a strategy that will change the existing power structures that connect multiple groups and have created the status quo. Playing the same old games shouldn’t be able to lead you to new results.

Heifetz continues to use the language of opposition battle and warfare such as can be found on page 128 through 130. If language is how we frame problems, then using the language of opposition and warfare is unlikely to produce the surprising alliances that their techniques call for.

Heifetz  suggests that adaptive leaders should project uncertainty right after he tells us how uncertain adaptive change can be. In this case, wouldn’t it be proper to interpret a projection of certainty as a lie or being unaware of the situation? I don’t see how he can have it both ways.

I strongly disagree with his advice to manage authority, which I consider to be a euphemism for saying that your authority figures are too stupid to understand the reward to risk estimate of the situation that you have made. If your reasoning and insights are sound, then we can expect senior leaders who have been tempered by experience and expertise to appreciate the nuance of your position. They didn’t get to be senior leaders by being stupid. Treating them as manageable objects is not a sound way to enlist their support. I believe it will make you be seen as a political gamester and not one who is genuinely concerned with building new capability and educating everyone around you. I think their advice is dangerous.

Chapter 11 orchestrating conflict

I like their idea of the musical metaphor of creative dissonance to encourage more rapid learning. Studies have shown that by slightly increasing our normal stress level we actually improve learning effectiveness. Too much stress leads to learning breakdowns, but not enough stress prevents rapid learning. There is a sweet spot which is elegantly described as creative dissonance.

I thought it was funny that step for of the seven steps to orchestrating conflict is entitled “orchestrating conflict”.

This chapter once again emphasizes the importance of getting by in upfront from authority figures, but once again this falls into the normal behaviors associated with authority and influence which they explicitly exclude from their definition of adaptive leadership.

On page 154 they use the language of “bad guys” to describe the opposition. This interpretation once again I believe is a tactical blunder because it locks you into a we-they situation and prevents establishing common ground. The whole book has a subtext of manipulation and lack of transparency in engaging other people and other groups which I find distasteful. I believe transparency and education and sharing the nuances of your insights to be more effective and honest in dealing with adaptive change.

On page 154-156 Heifetz extols the positive qualities of off-site meetings, as if he thinks that off-site conferences really accomplish anything in the lifecycle of a typical organization. In my experience in reading, it is far more common for line workers managers and leaders to treat offsites as an annual boondoggle that have nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of their organization. Most of the time in my experience, people can’t wait to get back to the office to resume their work and catch up on what they missed while they were at the off-site. This is a common complaint that can be found in the strategic planning literature, which is not referenced in this book.

Chapter 12: building an adaptive culture

I agree with the importance of developing leadership capacity inside the organization as much as possible, and all the time, and as a stated goal in value of the organization. I believe you cannot afford to wait for the crisis to start developing your leaders. It needs to be part of your ongoing daily focus.

I don’t think they say enough however about balancing risk and rewards when it comes to the idea of honoring risk-taking and experimentation. Not every risk is a good risk. There is a distinction between a business man’s risk and gambling. There is such a thing as a manageable risk whose reward does not justify it.

I find this concept to be of extreme interest to some of the most adaptive businesses that I know: international money managers and hedge funds, whose business survival requires them to be adaptive and whose central focus is precisely on understanding the relationship between risk and reward and effective decision-making. I find this lack of insight troubling in a book dedicated to building adaptive capabilities.

Hunt, chapter 3

the extended multilevel leadership model is complex enough for me to enjoy it. I like the distinctions he makes in the time frames and organizational hierarchy and the relationship between cultures and values and capabilities and the idea of critical tasks that are central to organizational survival. I’m looking forward to seeing how these connections relate.

On page 3100 says that organizational culture is derived from societal culture. I would ask him to go deeper there because we know that there are more than one culture in an organization and certainly within a society and so it is not a matter of mathematical duration, but one that looks more like evolution.

I would question his assertion on page 34 which says that leadership decisions become more complex and higher levels. I believe that the purpose of organizational hierarchies or to simplify subordinate situations in order to provide manageable variables and manageable choices for higher levels of the organization.

As an example, Gen. Eisenhower’s leadership decision was difficult, but came down to answering a single question on D-Day: do we invade or not. There was implied complexity at the lower levels but which were beyond his direct level of management or leadership to consider. There is a limit to human cognitive processing capability and necessarily systems must reduce the complexity of the world to manageable levels for humans to make decisions. I hope to see a discussion of this nuance later in the book.

Chapter 4

the discussion of the incommensurability and critical pluralism on pages 53 through 55, remind me of the theoretical discussions associated with mixed methods research. The parallels are striking. I attribute the lack of that discussion in this book to the fact that this was written in the early 90s, some years before the emergence of the mixed methods theoretical debate. We know that even in 2009 and 2010 from Creswell, that this remains an open issue: how to blend, if possible, research methods and insights from two distinct paradigms

I like the distinction between leaders and managers in this model, which I think is what Heifetz is dancing around when he distinguishes between technical and adaptive challenges. Simply accepting this well known division of labor would eliminate much of Heifetz is unique approach to leadership.

I would ask Hunt the following question about layered cultures which he discusses on page 59. He says that deeply held cultural values perhaps can only be approached through very subjective measures because they deal with deep-seated beliefs. I’m not sure why this has to be so, because it seems to me that if these beliefs are fundamental and persistent than evidence of their existence should be easy to find and objectively measured. It seems to me that centrally held organizational values should be identifiable from multiple perspectives in which case a subjective approach is not the only way to get to them.

Overall I enjoyed chapter 3 and 4 in Hunt, although like me, he would benefit from the work of an editor.

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